Improving your workspace booking experience with Flexday

Industry

Software Development

Output

Mobile app

Highlights

Coworking space aggregator and booking service Flexday wanted to make significant changes to their Android and iOS apps.

In 2.5 months, we helped Flexday build a new version of their React Native app to tackle a new B2B market.

With an updated user interface, Flexday users can now book office spaces faster, easily find the nearest offices to them, and like and rebook their favourite coworking spaces.

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About Flexday

Our client Flexday is a coworking space aggregator and booking service that aims to provide accessible, safe workspaces and meeting rooms for individuals and teams.

The challenge

Flexday partnered with Rangle to make significant changes to their Android and iOS apps. The coworking space network wanted to tap into a new B2B market to provide companies like ours with distributed working options for employees.

However, the existing app’s overall user experience and flow were in need of specific UX modifications to account for the needs of a B2B team user, as the existing layout catered to individual end users, and wasn’t focused on helping teams easily find spaces to work together.

This engagement was unique because our team at Rangle could identify themselves as Flexday’s newly targeted user group — we would essentially be building an app for ourselves and companies like ours.

Our cooperative approach to Discovery

With a very short timeline and a tight Discovery phase, we needed to focus on value and impact. Prior to the client engagement, there was little information available regarding Flexday’s new B2B user personas. As such, we set out to understand their business goals, and help Flexday flesh out their new user personas through research, workshops, and spoke directly with a number of stakeholders, to better understand their needs.

During our two-week Discovery phase, we conducted stakeholder interviews and a critical analysis of Flexday’s existing app, primarily focused on:

1. Aligning with Flexday’s mission and strategic vision

By working directly with Flexday’s leadership team, our team was able to align with the business goals that Flexday had set for itself. This meant we were better positioned to help Flexday prioritize new features and functionality based on tangible metrics they had already set for themselves.

2. Onboarding our team to the existing user experience and technical infrastructure

We knew that the only way to make smart decisions regarding the future of the UX would be by first understanding the current state of the front-end experience and back-end architecture. Our teams did a deep dive, both technically and in terms of laying out the user funnels, in order to get up to speed on the app.

3. Defining the core user personas that use the app, understanding their problems and needs

With Flexday’s desire to target a new B2B market segment, we led a multi-session exercise to define the various B2B user personas, which helped our teams align to the main problems that these personas were encountering in their day-to-day, which provided us with a starting point for coming up with innovative solutions to prioritize and then solve those problems.

4. Prioritizing feature requirements based on qualitative data and quantitative analytics

Based on the app’s analytics (as maintained in Amplitude), our team was able to correlate certain problems that we’d identified during customer interviews. This knowledge increased our confidence in what we believed would be the most important problems to solve that could have the highest impact on value creation for the end user.

5. Building out options for optimized user journeys that create a more seamless experience for Flexday customers

Once we had a clear line of sight into what problems we were trying to solve, and why we needed to prioritize them, we were able to shift our efforts to how we would solve them. We did this by building out a series of high-level user flows, depicting new paths that the user could take to learn about the app and its services, improved purchasing paths, as well as overall improvements to navigation and registration. With the Flexday team, we analyzed our suggested approaches, worked together to improve them further, and then moved to begin our design phase.

The process

As a result of our Discovery phase, we were able to move quickly towards iterating on a series of high-fidelity designs, focusing on solving specific B2B customer needs and problems such as:

Designing an all-new homepage and navigation experience to better direct users based on their unique intentions and segmentation.
Improving the otherwise complex booking process for larger ‘team spaces’ by presenting users with a short questionnaire that both informs them of their options and reduces time to conversion.
Adding in ‘quality of life’ improvements, such as adding the ability to search for Flexday partner locations, allowing the users to add locations to a favourites list, and to quickly view upcoming bookings.

Throughout the engagement, we provided continuous delivery through a series of four releases over a two-month period.

We also conducted technical validation on the proposed approaches, looking into options to create automated back-end processes to improve both the experience for the end user, but also to simplify bookings for the Flexday staff. After looking at the level of effort involved in solving some of the bigger problems in the app’s back-end, as well as understanding the business processes in place to support the ongoing support of the Flexday service, the team opted to approach the problem using good design by creating a more informative and directed user experience. This allowed the team to reduce the number of inquiries into the various services offered by Flexday while redirecting Flexday customers down booking flows for increased conversion without getting tied up in lengthy and complicated modifications to the supporting infrastructure. Prioritization, based on value vs impact frameworks, helped us make smarter decisions on where to spend our time and effort.

Bringing Rangle on board, our company received a fully-loaded engineering/product team overnight. They were friendly, professional and very knowledgeable. The meetings were efficient, the designs were well thought out, and the code was high quality and well-tested. We enjoyed working with them and look forward to collaborating again in the future!

— Amos Chan, Head of Engineering

The outcome

In 2.5 months, we helped Flexday build a new version of the React Native app to tackle a new B2B market for coworking and surplus coworking spaces. We added new features, including:

Flexday users can now book meeting rooms and offices faster with the Concierge tool, easily find the nearest office to them, and like and rebook their favourite coworking spaces through a friendly and helpful user interface.